Friday, 2016-06-24

From time to time, people who either don’t own firearms themselves, or who are protected by armed guards, call for “reasonable gun control”: licensing, registration, training requirements, and other bureaucratic hurdles. These calls usually follow highly publicized but statistically rare incidents of mass murder.

There is no criminological evidence to support the idea that registering firearms or licensing the people who buy them would prevent murders. Nor would requiring training.

And really, think about it: the Orlando mass-murderer had no criminal convictions. If he could legally buy a firearm, then he could also legally obtain a license. And registering his firearms would not have prevented any of his murders — we know very well who killed his victims. As for training, his marksmanship appears to have been excellent. None of the measures introduced under the banner of “reasonable gun control” would have reduced the body count in Orlando.

Who would be impacted by “reasonable gun control”? The poor. Who would not be impacted? Murderers, and the wealthy.

Consider this: about two-thirds of the intentional homicides in the USA are committed with firearms. If 100% of those were prevented (and not committed using some other weapon), the USA’s intentional homicide rate would still be higher than Denmark’s, Ireland’s, the UK’s, Norway’s, Sweden’s, Italy’s, Australia’s…

That fact might lead one to suspect that our problems have a deeper cause than merely the weapon most murderers choose. One might even think that our intentional homicide rate might be a symptom of a serious sickness in our society. But no one wants to hear that.